Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [194]
Notwithstanding Time’s irreverent report, intermittently, at least, Rand said she enjoyed speaking in front of mixed and liberal audiences. (At other times, she said that she hated speaking and “did it only for the cause.”) She told one large gathering in Boston that in the 1930s she had envied the socialists’ and New Dealers’ ability to argue from principle; the conservatives of the day did nothing but mouth worn-out bromides from an earlier era. “As an advocate of reason, freedom, individualism, and capitalism,” she announced, “I seek to address myself to men of the intellect—wherever such may still be found—and I believe that more of them may be found among the former ‘liberals’ than the present ‘conservatives.’” At Princeton, in a lecture called “Conservatism: An Obituary,” she took on the Right directly. Identifying herself not as a conservative but as a “radical for capitalism,” she spoke scornfully of the Buckleyites who, she said, were moral traitors for refusing to admit that free-market capitalism, not God or religion, had caused a century of American progress and prosperity. In November 1960, she was invited back to Yale for a second lecture. She called her speech “For the New Intellectual,” a name that would become the title of her first nonfiction book. This time, Yale thought it was prepared for a large crowd, but nearly twice as many students, professors, and visitors tried to crowd into her lecture as the hall could hold. She addressed an overflow audience in Ferris Booth Hall at Columbia University, which the copy editor Bertha Krantz attended. Krantz later told an interviewer, “That’s when I was struck by the number of students who were—just worshipped her. You could see it.”
Largely as a result of her speeches, the 1960s solidified her fame as a quixotic, tenacious, theatrically inflammatory social thinker. She traveled the country, lecturing to large, often unruly audiences. She gave major addresses at the University of Michigan, Boston University, Brown, Purdue, Johns Hopkins, West Point, Hunter, Adelphi, Syracuse, Sarah Lawrence, and MIT. In 1961 at the University of Wisconsin, she gave a lecture entitled “The Objectivist Ethics.” “What is morality, or ethics?” she asked the crowd. “It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions,” she answered. Quoting Galt’s speech, she listed Objectivism’s three cardinal values, which together provide the means for human beings to live and thrive independently. These are reason, purpose, and self-esteem. Reason—or more broadly, consciousness—is man’s “only source of knowledge,” she told the audience, but is a matter of free will; people can choose to engage it or turn it off. Purpose is the choice of the kind of happiness a person decides to pursue. And self-esteem is the “inviolate confidence that [a man’s] mind is competent to think and that his person is worthy of happiness.” She listed corresponding virtues, which she explained were behavioral traits needed to achieve a life of independence: rationality (knowing that nothing can alter the facts), productiveness (the means by which thought and work sustain life), and pride (seeking to earn the right to hold oneself as one’s most important value, which she also called “moral ambitiousness”). She defined happiness as the consciousness of having achieved one’s values. As for the pursuit of heedless pleasure, which her critics frequently accused her of promoting, she scoffed at it as a negative value—an unthinking person’s way of finding momentary relief from a chronic state of terror, à la Lillian Rearden in Atlas Shrugged. Other individualistic, entrepreneurial virtues